Grammar schools / NWSSEE English (continuous writing) / Mock 2
Nonsuch and Wallington Second Stage Entrance Examination · Second Stage
NWSSEE English Mock Paper 2
Preparation for the Nonsuch and Wallington Second Stage Entrance Examination, sat for admission to Nonsuch High School for Girls and Wallington High School for Girls. This is an original mock paper written by Revision Library. It is not a past paper and it is not an official specimen.
Print the paper (PDF)Paper and mark scheme (PDF)
- Time allowed
- 45 minutes
- Total marks
- 25
- Questions
- 1
- Level
- Familiarisation
- You have 45 minutes for this paper. There is one task and it is worth 25 marks.
- Spend about five minutes planning and checking your work, and about forty minutes writing.
- Write your answer on the lined pages of this booklet. There is no rough paper, so make your plan in the space beneath the task.
- Read the whole task, including the planning box, before you start. Marks are given for covering everything you are asked to cover.
- Marks are given for how well your writing matches the form, the audience and the purpose you are given, and for your spelling, punctuation and grammar.
Continuous Writing
Answer this one task. Write in sentences and paragraphs.
- 125 marks
The photograph: a fox stands in the middle of an empty high street, just after dawn. Every shop shutter is down. A bus waits at the traffic lights further up the road with nobody aboard, not even a driver. Above the bakery, one upstairs window is lit.
The girl at that lit window has been awake all night. She is the only person in the town who sees the fox.
Write a story for a collection of new writing by young people to entertain your readers, using this photograph as your starting point.
Planning: your story must begin with this sentence, exactly as it is written here.
"By the time the light came, I had made up my mind."
An answer that has clearly been prepared in advance, and that does not fit the form or the task you have been set here, will receive no marks.
Spend about 40 minutes on this task.
Answers, mark scheme and worked explanations
- 125 marks
Gate: form and task (pass or fail)
- The answer is a story, with a narrative voice, events that follow one another and a deliberate ending. A description of the photograph with no story in it fails here.
- The story begins with the given sentence, word for word and with no words added in front of it. Changing the sentence, or working it in halfway down the page, fails this gate.
- The photograph is used as a starting point. The fox, the shuttered street, the empty bus or the lit window must matter to the story rather than being mentioned once and abandoned.
- The purpose is to entertain a reader of the writer's own age, not to record a diary entry or to explain what foxes eat.
- A memorised story that has been steered towards this page, and that does not address the form or the task set, is awarded no marks overall.
Content and audience (10 marks)
- 9-10: The given sentence is genuinely honoured, so the reader learns what was decided and why it mattered. The narrator has a voice of her own. Description is used sparingly and precisely, and the imagined world of the empty street feels observed rather than invented. The ending is chosen, not merely reached.
- 6-8: A clear story with a decision at its heart and some strong description. One or two ideas are left undeveloped, or the ending arrives too quickly.
- 3-5: Events happen, but the opening sentence is not really cashed in and the photograph is decoration. Description is generic.
- 0-2: Little narrative shape, or a piece that ignores the stimulus altogether.
Structure and style (8 marks)
- 7-8: Paced with control: the story does not rush the opening or hurry the close. Paragraphs mark shifts in time, place or thought. Sentence length is varied for effect, and dialogue, if used, is punctuated correctly and earns its place.
- 5-6: Sound shape with a beginning, middle and end. Some passages are pacier than others without that being intended.
- 3-4: Episodic and list-like, or so much time is spent on the opening that the ending is a single line.
- 0-2: No discernible structure, or the writing stops rather than ends.
Technical accuracy (7 marks)
- 6-7: Accurate sentence demarcation, correct speech punctuation, secure and sometimes ambitious spelling, and a tense that stays where it was put.
- 4-5: Generally accurate, with occasional slips in speech punctuation or in harder spellings.
- 2-3: Repeated comma splices or missing full stops, or a tense that drifts between past and present.
- 0-1: Errors so frequent that they interrupt the reading.
The whole task turns on the sentence you are given. It says a decision has already been made, which means your reader immediately wants two things: to know what the decision was, and to know what happened next. A strong answer keeps that promise. A weak one writes the given line and then wanders off to describe the sunrise for a page.
You do not have to explain the decision straight away. Holding it back for a paragraph is a real technique, and it works. What you must not do is finish the story without ever telling us. That is the single commonest way to lose content marks on a task like this.
Use the photograph, but use it as a writer would. The shuttered street, the driverless bus and the single lit window are atmosphere you have been handed for free. Choose two of those details and make them do some work in your story, rather than listing all of them in the first paragraph and never returning.
Watch for two more traps. The first is spending thirty minutes on a beautiful build-up and then finishing with the narrator waking up, which throws away everything you have built. The second is dialogue with no punctuation. If you have people speaking, give every piece of speech its own inverted commas and its own line.
Plan for five minutes: decide what the decision is, what stands in the way of it, and what the last line will be. Write for about thirty-three minutes, and glance at the clock at the halfway mark, because a story needs its last third. Save five minutes to read it back for full stops, capital letters after speech, and any sentence you cannot say out loud in one breath.
Nonsuch and Wallington Second Stage Entrance Examination, Second Stage, English (continuous writing). Written by Revision Library on 2026-08-28, independent check pending.
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